Archive for the ‘Language of teenagers’ Category

Saturday night was Midsummer’s Eve (St. John’s Eve), yesterday Midsummer Day (St. John’s Day) — so that last night was Midsummer Night, when the fairies frolic. (As they did indeed, at SF Pride events.) Meanwhile there are cartoons: a Bill Whitehead Free Range cartoon from 9/6/17, in the July 2018 issue of Funny Times; a John Atkinson Wrong Hands cartoon that came to me from Eleanor Houck; and a Scott and Borgman Zits cartoon in today’s King Features feed.

First come the cartoons, then come the holidays. (Apologies to Brecht and his Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral — pleasure first, then the serious stuff.)

Over the years, Mark Liberman and I have posted about the Chatty Girls trope on the strip, retailing the (basically false) stereotype that women, and especially teenage girls, chatter on ceaselessly, overwhelming guys (with their laconic ways). One guy sandwiched between two girls doesn’t have a chance.

A follow-up to my posting “That goes without”, on an Amanda Hess piece in the NYT Magazine of 6/14, about the (largely) teenage use of “I can’t even” to convey being rendered speechless by strong emotion. Now to the letters section in the magazine for 6/28, which comes with two Tom Gauld cartoons illustrating reader comments.

A little paradox of Internet celebrity is that a YouTube personality can amass millions upon millions of young fans by making it seem as if he’s chatting with each of them one to one. Tyler Oakley, a 26-year-old man who identifies as a “professional fangirl,” is a master of the genre. He has nerd glasses, pinchable cheeks, a quiff he dyes in shades of blue and green and more YouTube subscribers than Shakira. Some of his teenage admirers have told him that he is the very first gay person that they have ever seen. He models slumber party outfits and gushes over boy bands, giving the kids who watch him from their bedrooms a peek into a wider world.

(#1)

In March 2012, Oakley faced the camera, balanced a laptop in his sightline and paged through a photo set of the curly-haired actor Darren Criss, whose turn as a hunky gay singer in “Glee” made him a fixture of teenage dreams. In these new pictures, which had just been leaked online, Criss was lounging on a beach wearing only a pair of low-rise jeans and a layer of perspiration. Oakley’s videotaped reaction was exultant. “I literally cannot even,” he informed his fans. “I can’t even. I am unable to even. I have lost my ability to even. I am so unable to even. Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

Criss in high-hunky (almost shirtless) mode:

(#2)

Soon, Oakley’s groupies had immortalized his soliloquy in GIF form: “Can’t” upon “can’t,” looping forever. Now they could conjure the GIF whenever they felt so overcome by emotion that they couldn’t even complete a thought. Oakley was not the first to recast the sentence fragment “I can’t even” as a stand-alone expression. He just helped shepherd it out of the insular realm of Tumblr fandom and into the wide-open Internet.

An unusually big crop of cartoons this morning, including one (a Rhymes With Orange) on stereotypes about men’s tastes (for Fathers Day). Plus another Zits with the stereotype of chatty teenage girls; another strip (a Mother Goose and Grimm) on Yoda’s syntax; a Zippy on synonyms for disapproving; and a Bizarro on the extension of metaphors to simulacra.